A Dublin pest control worker has told how a pack of rats pounced on a cat before dragging it into a ditch and devouring it.

John Magee, a surveyor with Rentokil, said the horrifying incident took place at a site that had been infested with the rodents.

He told Newstalk's Henry McKean: "The poor cat was just walking by there and I knew there was a population of rats on site.

"I was doing a survey to get ready to put control over the situation and I noticed the amount of rats was so vast, they had taken a small kitten basically and dragged it into the ditch and that was the end of the cat.”

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Dublin City Council have acknowledged that there has been an increase in rat numbers across the city.

The local authority said this was due to a combination of factors, including the unusually summer, an increase in building works, and an increase in fast food outlets across the city.

Local councillor Mannix Flynn said he believed the council must shoulder some of the blame for the growing problem.

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Speaking to McKean on the Pat Kenny Show, Cllr Flynn said: “Because you’ve had a downturn in the economy, I believe the local authorities and the health authorities took their eye off the ball here.

"On the islands where the seagulls would traditionally nest, they’re now infested with rats, so they can’t actually nest because the rats are going over to the nests.

"We have a serious problem here in terms of public health, in terms of how we manage the public domain, so the best way of doing this is to catch actually catch these rats and do away with them in a humane manner.”

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Audrey Plunkett, a resident of O'Carroll Villas on Cuffe Street for the past 50 years, told McKean she believed that the community needed to rally together to tackle the problem.

She said: “If all the people, even in the flats here, got together, got big cages and put them out at nighttime and checked them the next morning, we’d probably get rid of the best part of them ourselves.”

Ms Plunkett said that that rats "as big as small kittens" are even able to make their way up to the upper levels of the flat complexes.

She said: “They’re able to come up the stairs on to the balcony, even though we have a steel door.”

In Pearse House on Pearse Street, local resident Courtney Kelly told how the vermin are chewing through the doors of the flats.